Bozcaada, Turkey
In the very first Weddings and Whitewater post, Julia described her wish to one day spend a summer on a Greek Island in the Aegean Sea. She pictured us living in a town with winding cobbled walkways where the dwellings would be either old stone houses or bleached white stucco with red terra cotta tiles on the roofs. We would dine on a high terrace shaded by grape-vine leaves, watching the sun dip behind the hills of the surrounding islands. We would stay on a grape vineyard, where olive and lemon trees in neat rows would fade over the hillsides past the towering columns of ancient ruins on the outskirts of town. The vineyard would be presided over by a friendly old grandmother who spoke not a word of English, but instead communicated with an infectious smile whenever she saw us. The wine would be red, the hills would be green, and the Aegean would be a deep, deep blue.
Well, we never made it to Greece. It was too expensive, it was too hot, and the country is on the brink of an economic disaster. Luckily, the lovely North Aegean coast of Turkey was more than happy to indulge this fantasy.
Julia and I took an overnight bus once again, leaving the fairytale land of Cappadocia in Central Turkey and waking up in Selcuk, outside the ancient ruins of Ephesus. We spent the afternoon waiting for the day to cool off and then entered the ruins of Ephesus in early evening after the rumbling diesel buses had whisked away the hordes of tourists. During the middle of the day, visitors covering the streets of Ephesus make it resemble the ancient city it once was, but by arriving just a couple of hours before sundown, Julia and I had the place largely to ourselves. We toured the ancient temples, stadiums, libraries and baths, having the quiet reflective experience I’ve always missed at other ruins overflowing with the teeming masses.
From there we moved up the coast to the town of Ayvalik, a centuries-old Greek and Turkish city with the aforementioned beautiful houses and narrow, winding cobblestone streets. Ayvalik sits on the southern entrance of a wide bay overlooking the Aegean. In the center of the bay is the Greek Island of Lesvos, home of the Lesbians (from whence comes the name ). In Ayvalik, we didn’t do much of anything for three or four days which is really the best way to experience such a place. We just absorbed it, drank in the beauty, and enjoyed the local pace of life. We stayed in a 120-year old stone Greek house up the hill from the harbor. There were grape-vine leaf shaded terraces where we dined on delicious food and wine. My dad mentioned in an email that if he found such a place, he wouldn’t take one more step on the trip and would pass the rest of the 9-months in that house until he ran out of time or money. Well, Julia and I are much too high-strung for that and if we were going to do nothing, we at least had to move on and do it somewhere new. (Frankly, I don’t think my dad, a physician who is both a medical director at a hospital and also runs his own private practice, would be very good at all at doing ‘nothing’ for very long… and really, neither would anyone else in my family… or in Julia’s family for that matter).
So on we moved, through the rolling hills of the coast covered with rows of sunny olive trees, to the old Greek harbor of Assos. Assos is divided into the ancient town on top of a hill and the working harbor over a thousand feet below it. Assos is on the northern entrance of the same large bay as Ayvalik, similarly overlooking the Greek Island of Lesvos. We stayed on the hilltop settlement but walked down into the harbor for dinner in the evening, dining on fresh fish. The sun was sinking low in the sky as we walked down to the harbor, making the Aegean shimmer and turning Lesvos and the tall hills leading down to the water on the Turkish coast a deep shade of purple.
We have now moved on to the Turkish island of Bozcaada where we are staying in a wine-producing vineyard that is over 100 years old. A sweet Grandmother presides over the vineyard and yes, her communication is relegated to a smile. After sunset, the extended family of a dozen people or so gathers to dine together under lanterns on the vine-covered veranda. There is a short walk down a cobbled path to a small sandy beach.
While we weren’t trying to live out our Aegean Island fantasy during this part of the trip, somehow it ended up happening anyway.
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